Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe: Twenty-Nine Years and a Dagger

On 30 May 1593 Christopher Marlowe spent the day at Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford with three men who had all previously been employed by the Walsinghams. According to the coroner's inquest — a document lost until 1925 — they quarrelled over the reckoning, Marlowe snatched Ingram Frizer's dagger and wounded him, and in the struggle was stabbed above the right eye and killed instantly. Frizer was acquitted of murder and pardoned within a month. Marlowe was twenty-nine, and had already altered what English drama was capable of.

A Shoemaker's Son in Canterbury

He was baptised on 26 February 1564 at St George's Church, Canterbury, the second of nine children of the shoemaker John Marlowe and his wife Katherine, which made him roughly two months older than Shakespeare. By fourteen he was at The King's School, Canterbury on a scholarship, and he went on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, again on a scholarship, on a track that was expected to end in Anglican orders. He took his BA in 1584.

The Privy Council's Letter

In 1587 Cambridge hesitated over awarding his Master of Arts, on the rumour that he intended to enter the Catholic seminary at Rheims. The Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen. No surviving record uses the word espionage, but the college books show unusually lengthy absences in 1584–85 in breach of regulations, and buttery accounts running well beyond anything his scholarship could have covered. Oxford's Great Writers Inspire project summarises the portrait that has accumulated around him — spy, heretic, counterfeiter, homosexual, atheist — which is a list of allegations rather than a list of findings.

Mighty Lines

Tamburlaine, in two parts, reached the stage in 1587. It was the first English dramatic work written in blank verse, it made Marlowe the leading dramatist of the moment, and it fixed the metre that English drama would use thereafter. Dido, Queen of Carthage followed, probably around 1591–93 and possibly performed first of all; then The Jew of Malta (1592) and Edward II (1592), the latter regarded as his most modern play for its psychological depth. Doctor Faustus, his reworking of the Faust legend, survives in texts dated between 1594 and 1597. The Massacre at Paris (1593) has been called his most dangerous play for the violent rhetoric against refugees that it fed.

In verse he left Hero and Leander, unfinished at his death and completed by George Chapman in 1598; "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," from about 1587–88; and translations of Ovid's Amores, publicly burned as offensive in 1599, and of Lucan's Pharsalia.

The Baines Note

In May 1593 bills threatening French and Netherlandish Protestant refugees were posted in London — the Dutch church libel. Thomas Kyd, who had shared a room with Marlowe, was arrested, and when heretical documents were found among his papers he attributed them to Marlowe, describing him as blasphemous and holding treasonous opinions. The informer Richard Baines then submitted a note listing eighteen statements attributed to Marlowe, among them that "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest." Modern scholars are divided over whether these represent his actual convictions or cover for intelligence work. The Privy Council issued a warrant for his arrest on 18 May 1593; he presented himself on 20 May and was instructed to attend daily "until he shall be licensed to the contrary." Ten days later he was dead.

Deptford

The official account has never satisfied anyone. The three witnesses were, as scholars have pointed out, professional liars: Robert Poley was an agent provocateur and a consummate one, Nicholas Skeres a confidence trickster, and Frizer a Walsingham man. Theories of murder have ranged from Audrey Walsingham's jealousy through an order from the Privy Council to the Queen herself, and none has ever been proved. He was buried in an unmarked grave at St Nicholas Church, Deptford, on 1 June 1593.

Why Christopher Is Called a Genius

The quality is metrical and structural rather than philosophical. Marlowe took blank verse — available, but unproven on the public stage — and in Tamburlaine demonstrated what it could carry, with the result that essentially every significant English play for the next three centuries is written in a line he established. Ben Jonson's phrase for it, "Marlowe's mighty line," is the contemporary verdict and nobody has improved on it. Alongside the metre he invented a character type: the overreaching protagonist, humanist and damned, which Tamburlaine, Faustus and Barabas each embody and which passed directly into the work of his contemporaries.

The counter-case concerns scale, and it is unavoidable. He died at twenty-nine having written six plays, one unfinished poem and some translations, and the texts themselves are unstable — Doctor Faustus survives in competing versions with disputed authorship of portions. Nothing he left has the range of mature Shakespeare, and the comparison forces itself because the two were born the same year. The fringe theory that Marlowe faked his death and went on to write as Shakespeare, which academic consensus rejects, is in a backhanded way the best evidence of how far the genius label has been inflated around him: the myth exists because the surviving work is not quite large enough to satisfy the reputation. The defensible claim is narrower and still extraordinary. Marlowe found the instrument, proved what it could do, and handed it on to men who had longer to use it.

Legacy

His contemporaries were unstinting. George Peele remembered him as "Marley, the Muses' darling," and Michael Drayton wrote that he "Had in him those brave translunary things / That the first poets had." Shakespeare's debt is traceable in the text: he quotes Hero and Leander in As You Like It, and scholars find Marlowe behind Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. The blank verse he proved on the stage in 1587 outlived him by four centuries, which is a substantial return on six years of work.

Achievements

• Notable work: Edward II
• Notable work: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
• Notable work: The Jew of Malta